Vendors: Go back to the land or to Sata’s house

President Micheal Sata is totally wrong, as usual. The irrationality of his argument and that of his mob supporters that street vendors must stay on the streets until jobs or markets are found for them will be proved. The fact is that those jobs or markets will never be found for all of them. So Sata should tell vendors to occupy his house which he left in Northmead when getting into State House to sell from there, rather than let them to our streets which he does not own.

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BREAKING NEWS COMMENT (1)

It is likely that as Sata’s frustration in his obsession to close down the Watchdog continues, he may resort to arresting writers of the Watchdog, as his stooges are insinuating. Listen to me King Cobra. I have deliberately put my name here to show you and your stooges that I am not afraid of you. I will attack your tribalism to the bitter end. If you arrest me, I will fight the tribalist among your arresting officers. If you convict me, I will fight the tribalist prisoner who, like you, will create a Muchinga cell in order to give more beans to his tribemen. If I die in the process and become a ghost I will fight my fellow ghost which, like you, will create a Muchinga province and tax us the human carcass which we will be collecting to feed his tribe. If I go to heaven I will fight the tribalist Angel who, like you, will create a Muchinga chapel so that his tribesmen will eat more Eucharist bought with our tithe. If I am sent to hell I will fight the tribalist among us the sinners who will, like you, create a less hot Muchinga compartment so that his tribesmen will suffer less heat of the everlasting fire.

So either way, I will fight the tribalist of your kind.

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I will be brief this week, since I know that most of you won’t read many new articles because you won’t have access to internet owing to the fact that you only use office computers and time. But offices are closed for New Year and Christmas.

No world jobs: A coming of Marxist Revolutions?

Sata’s ignorance of economic trends is what makes him make such havoc decisions. With PF budget projected around 7 % growth rate against a 3% population growth rate, there is no likelihood of even reducing the unemployment rate to even 40% in the next ten years. So what is Sata projecting the jobs to come from? Which statistics is he using? No single soul on earth is responsible for giving jobs to anybody. Our backwardness in Africa is because we don’t want to hear the truth. Firstly, government jobs are limited and besides the same PF government promised to reduce government size and beauracracy to save costs. Secondly, the private sector cannot take on everybody. Besides, with new technology that requires fewer but highly skilled workers, nobody will employ all those street vendors. Thirdly, many of those street vendors simply have no qualification to be employed. If Sata himself who equally has no qualifications could not create jobs but only managed to buy six guns in his entire close to 70 years of life, why does he expect others to employ the vendors?

No Government around the world has ever encouraged street vendors as a condition that they are given jobs. In the USA President Obama promised the jobs, but when he could not offer those jobs by now, the jobless have resorted to Egyptian-Tunisian form of protests, which they call ‘Occupy Wall Street’. In the EU, where only Germany has a fairly good employment rate, they are all protesting as ‘Occupy London’, ‘Occupy Paris’ etc. But none of this Government has told them to stay on the streets until they are given jobs.

Yet, Sata has an easier solution to unemployment than his Western counterparts. The Western economies have reached a ‘saturation point’. This is the level which German-Jewish Philosopher (1818-1883), whom Professor Ali Mazrui referred to as ‘ the last of the Jewish prophets’, prophesized. In his publications Des Captita and Communist Manifesto (1847), Marx warned that the bourgeois (huge capital money-makers) will squeeze off all small scale produces, establish large scale monopolies and then reduce every peasant to the level of a dependant worker. There would therefore no other way to survive than to get a job from these giant firms. Marx was also well aware that these jobs will not come easy because of technology. Technology entails mass production using machines, which require just a few employees but who are well educated in international commerce, production and technology. These are the few workers needed in today’s economies and none of those Sata promised jobs come anywhere near this level.

In the West an individual can hardly produce food on a subsistence level, because all land is occupied and all farming highly mechanized. Westerners can not buy a cabbage grown by an individual on a plot. They buy professionally grown food, fish, beef etc. To survive, you must only work. In Zambia, space for self-reliance and sale on this scale is vastly abundant. In Europe virtually all shopping is from large shopping conglomerates, like Shoprite, Game, etc. You cannot start a kantemba there. Here you can survive by investing in small shops.

Marx, like all Jewish thinkers like Moses, Jesus Christ, Freud, or Albert Einstein has a huge worldwide following. He predicted that this situation will lead to a revolution by the frustrated poor people. And it is coming to pass. The US ‘Occupy Movement and all the revolts in the oil rich Arab world is an indicator that the revolutions are on their way. Yet, instead of watching world trends and plan a way in which Zambia can prevent such an occurrence, our President is encouraging an ‘Occupy Lusaka’ movement by street vendors.

No space for markets. Can Sata and his minions point at any specific site where they plan to take those street vendors? Which one? On UNZA Goma football grounds? At that ground in Chibobya? Just on whose land? The European Union is helping Government build modern markets, but this is by mainly by improving already existing trading sites, so that after they are completed the same numbers as those that are there now will occupy them. Where they build on completely new sites, it’s on newly established residential areas, such as Chalala, which will take only those living there, not those in town.

All plots are owned . When Sata allows vendors to stay on the street does he realize that he is actually telling them to stay on other people’s land? The shop corridor is owned by the shop owner. If Sata can tell somebody to sell on the land I toiled to buy while he was lazing around and buying only six guns, he is violating my right. That is why I am urging them to go and sell at his house. The space next is the car park, run by councils. Sata found the councils in existence and he should not assign his cadres there. The next are roads. Does Sata own these?

Nobody is responsible for finding plots for anybody. You apply to anybody who has land, either the council, ministry of lands or a chief or individual owner. But because of Sata’s rhetoric a group of squatters are refusing to leave somebody’s plot they are leaving on saying ‘the President allowed street vendors, what of us?’ People must be told the truth. Go to chiefs and ask for land while it is plenty. Create the jobs there yourself. Build nice places there and towns. Whites in Mukushi Farming Block, the land which you left, are already building small ‘towns’ there. Next you will go there, stay on the streets and say somebody must build you a market and force the whites to give you jobs? You black muntu. Change your mentality and be productive. Sata is wasting your time. He will leave office or this earth while you rot on those streets. Then the next government will kick you out.

If these streets vendors establish themselves even for a year, we may never remove them. They will block all the roads and using their voting and violent power they never move out. We may just have to leave them there and move our capital elsewhere, much in the same way Nigeria moved their capital from Lagos to Abuja to ‘decongest’ Lagos.

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BREAKING NEWS COMMENT

90 days yama labbish. This is how comedian ‘Difficult’ would put it. A man inherits another man’s three children and renames them all within four days of marrying the woman. President Sata inherited three Airports and renamed them all before adding a single ngwee to improving them. What can you think of people calling such a man a hero? Mentally blank? How on earth can renaming a thing count as an achievement? Even the colonial masters or Kaunda, Kapwepwe, Nkumbula themselves, were more decent because they have not claimed as achievements in their CVs their renaming of towns such as Chipata (from Fort Jameson), Kabwe (from Broken Hill ) or Mansa ( from Abercorn ). Only failures claim credit for such. But this is what happens in a country when values are lost. This is what happens in a country when personal survival opportunism takes precedence over serious service to humanity. We support a leader who we know is not presidential material and when you realize he has done nothing, you smear nice words to non-achievements.

Yes, ‘only a Michael’ can create a Muchinga Province instead of the Barotseland Agreement which he promised in 90 days. Why? Because ‘only a Michael’ is a tribalist. Even where all statistics show that the justification for creating Muchinga is not there, he creates one there so that state funds that belong to the entire country are channeled to the region where he comes from. A person or institution supporting such a thing is a tribalist, just like one who praises Idi Amin in 1971 for taking over goods from Asians to give black Ugandans!

Today we are told that there must be something wrong with those questioning Sata to deliver in 90 days because this is not possible. If a child who is asking for a plate of chikanda he was promised within 90 days can be said to have a wrong mentality, what more the one who promised? Those questioning Sata to give what he promised are proving a point, correctly so, that they were right to argue during elections that Sata was either deliberately lying to win votes or simply ignorant about how Government operates. Today his minions are saying that if Sata fails it will be those he appointed not him. Why can’t the same be said about every former President? When the opposition leaders like Hakainde Hichilemna said the constitution can not be delivered within 90 days, his same minions said it will be done in 90 days whether HH like it or not. They must admit their embarrassment. It is unfortunate they are human beings. Because if they were tortoises they would have pulled their heads into the shell to save themselves from embrassment. Now William Banda is arrested for merely meeting 20 people remaining them over the 90-day promises!

Those full of Sata’s embarrassing failures must shut up. Can they bootlick him without attacking those who are not bootlickers!? We will oppose Sata and enjoy ourselves or it whether they like it or not. They will choke with frustration and envy as well keep feeling good by exposing the incompetence of SADC’s ever worst ruler, Micheal Chilufya Sata.!

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Agrarian Revolution: A Solution for Zambia

When the South African Government saw the influx of unemployable blacks on the streets as a result of the Great Depression, they created Bantustans (semi-autonomous) provincial government to encourage blacks to go back to their lands. Although this plan is heavily criticized by the ANC when it was proposed, it has some merit in the sense of trying to promote rural agrarian based production. Unemployed urban people must be encouraged to go an occupy their ancestral lands before it is too late. (Not surprisingly, even if the term ‘Bantustan’ was said of the Tonga people in a negative sense, they seem to take pride in it, as exhibited by Mazabuka MP Garry Nkombo’s dressing in a cowboy wear with a T/Shirt written’ Bantustan for Life’! Maybe they have embraced this label, Bantustan amaanza obilo since to them it means ‘Go Back to the Land’!)

Even Kaunda had a better understanding of world economic events than Sata. In the advent of high urban employment in the 70’s Kaunda did not encourage street vending. Instead on 11th October 1777 Kaunda called an emergency session of Parliament and called for serious agrarian reforms, which calumniated into the slogan, GO Back To The Land. Among the specific plans was the (a) increase in state support on farmer inputs and technology, (b) expansion of agriculture extension services, (c) formation of a two new state companies. curved out of NAMBOARD, one to collect and export vegetables and fruits and another to promote the production and exportation of cotton.

Of course, these measures failed, mainly because Kaunda was promoting agriculture to a largely ignorant peasantry. However, this was a better effort than what Sata is trying to say.

So really, Sata is totally confused about what do. That is why even those that support him can’t walk with a head high.